This article considers what it meant to grow old gracefully as a woman in Britain in the early nineteenth century by focusing on intergenerational relationships and mentoring. Despite the ambivalent response to the figure of the older woman, her potential as mentor is frequently foregrounded in advice literature in this period. However, in contrast to this prescriptive ideal, the life writing of Lady Louisa Stuart (1757–1851) provides a rare opportunity to explore how older women navigated the culturally ascribed role of mentor. Stuart considers the vexed question of how to grow old gracefully in extensive correspondence with younger women and as a biographer of previous generations. The recovery of Stuart, a writer who barely published during her long lifetime, suggests how women’s late life writing has the potential to complicate cultural narratives of ageing and gender and provide insight into the dynamic relationship between writing and ageing.

This article argues that lyric poetry is a form suited to contesting dominant ideas about masculinity because of its thematic and formal preoccupations with voice. It argues that voice offers a different way of viewing the social constrictions that accompany male experiences of ageing to the well-known theory of the mask of ageing. Through a study of a long history of Western lyric verse, which includes writers such as William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost and Philip Larkin, the article explores the significance of restricted breathing in relation to dominant norms of masculine reticence and the physiological deterioration of the vocal profile in age. It then explores the possibility of counter-voicings of masculinity in poems with intergenerational themes from a group of post-war British poets.